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Op Ed: Americans Learning That Radical Action 'The Hard Way' Is NOW Demanded of Us ALL

By Henry Clay Ruark for Salem-News.com

Overwhelming Consequences Vs. Youth, Young Adults Motivates Millions

Courtesy: mazaika.com

(BEND, Ore.) - Millions of American parents are worried sick-and-nearly silly over negative consequences they see set solidly into life-sequences now for their beloved progeny --essentially inescapable, and bound to get even worse.

These same millions are becoming mightily aroused --and angered-- when they DO begin to think-and-learn the realities they have allowed to occur in our nation through their own apathy and inattention.

That inescapable political consequence is one of the strongest forces driving a sweeping return to the political principles of the famed progressive era, at the heart of FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s New Society.

Those three powerful Presidencies first initiated and then put into effective action programs providing the long/lasting foundations for America’s prolific, prolonged and pronounced success in the world --familiar to all of us who have lived those years and garnered the comfortable consequences in our own life experiences.

That’s where Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, strongly-improved minimum-wage, and most roven-and-practical American social, economic and cultural programs originated --something far too many of us, born a generation later, have now forgotten or often fail to fully appreciate.

Working in sequential impacts, despite deeply disturbing world-and-national events, these administrations established the strongest nation, with the largest 'middle classThe American Dream.

That was accomplished despite international and some national 'negative events' inevitable in a rapidly escalating-speed century which saw World War II, the excruciatingly painful and damaging Vietnam debacle, and other truly amazing happenings.

Many-such centered on the swift, sure new technologies for mass communication which should have and could have built better, broader and certainly more beatific access-and-participation for essential citizen impacts on our governance system, at every level, and in every way.

We were seduced and set into spin-surround by the distortion and perversions not only of political manipulation and issue-management --bought and paid for by corporate campaign contributions made possible only by purchased corporate personhood -- but also by overwhelming surrender to blandishment and blarney built from advertising devoted to dollar-decimating indulgence and designed for corporate profit uber alles.

But that Dream is now driven away --far into a questionable future-- by thirty years of concentrated so-called 'conservative' collaboration, finally ending in a cabal-oriented and corporation-controlled open attack on our Constitution and the famed Bill of Rights.

Long demeaning those three world-renowned Presidencies, the so-called 'conservative consensus' finds itself self/collapsed and reduced to neo-con nonentity-status now as the direct result of its own inner contradictions and confusions --and despite billions --perhaps trillions--spent by Far Right billionaires, desperately seeking their own private purposes and protections.

That attack has been so severe, debilitating and destructive that Congress is now forced to consider impeachment for the Bush II cabal and its collection of flawed-and-incompetent collaborators --since to allow any such attack-on-democracy to go unpunished is to invite its invocation once again, when again inattention and apathy are ever allowed to reign.

Being typical American loving parents, these millions have now 'come late to real understandings' about their own brood --and the current sometimes/catastrophic economic, cultural and healthy-life consequences forced by that overly/long “conservative” regime.

But then they are, NOW --in typical American sudden situation concentration-- just that much more-concerned, deeply-motivated, and determined to take whatever action they can, in whatever ways can be discovered so to do.

They’ve just learned --from unquestionable, widely documented sources -- that the essentials of the American Dream have now become practically outside the reach of most youth and adults.

That study, done by Demos, noted nonpartisan group devoted to public-policy research, was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

This unworthy summary simply surveys the demanded 'MUST SEE' section of that report; its essence is that our American society has unmercifully short-changed its coming generation --the youth and young adults we know as our own progeny-- in shameful and shortsighted ways sure to cost us all dearly for the next half-century.

Here’s what it reports as now under threat for that entire generation: A decent job bringing satisfaction, effective income and benefits, practical access to demanded levels of education and, for those desiring it, to college and specialized professional preparation, early entrance into adult lifestyle and responsibilities, including choice of marriage-and-family; and ongoing comprehensive healthcare, making all else possible.

For full details of how drastic, disheartening and often disabling these rapidly-worsening situations have now become in our depreciating society, see the study in TAP, March 2008.

Surely it is the height of demonstrated stupidity for these millions of American parents !to have allowed a second-shot situation like a Bush-II "administration" to occur AGAIN!

Similar obviously demeaning, desperately-damaging, and damnably incompetent, ignorant, mirror-image malignant manipulation of our nation and its democratic processes occurred once before --during the Reagan administration.

This one --with some of the same personnel in charge-- began in the Reagan era, thirty years ago, with major now proven/disastrous policies set then, and now repeated, with consequences clearly evident then, and during at least the last decade; and now another historic debacle over the most painful period: EIGHT LONG YEARS!

Even given the demonstrably-desperate, economically-driven failure of our vaunted free press, already underway --clearly seen with comfortable and comforting relations widely and wildly pursued for this cabal by the MSMedia-- it is American-voter stupidity which must win our working attention here, even if we allow for the unquestioned heavy impact of "the noise machine" purposely generated for that task by those cabalized Far Right billionaires, early-on.

Without that failure, these millions of Americans might well have been paying attention to our national business, rather than to the wide panoply of diversions and distractions cannily contrived to fully consolidate attention elsewhere than on cogitation --in our free press seen for several generations as the essential key for those critical citizen understandings demanded for democracy to work.

Ironic is the word for the realization that some of the same inanities and inescapably shallow-focus/coverage that clearly characterized the Reagan era still worked AGAIN as well-compensated full-comfort action accorded to the cabal by far too many in the media during all those intervening years.

"Free" is what makes it ironic--in both senses of that word.

BUT free -- in the true sense as intended and organized by our Founding Fathers -- is the demanded method and means by which what we must NOW DO is made possible and practical, too.

Let’s get on with freeing up the free press to be REALLY free and thus guide our now-beginning to cogitate citizens to what we can become AGAIN...if we have the wit, wisdom and will demanded of us by the Founders via their own example.

Still another sharp-and-demanded tool is the impeachment process, already under impossible-to-ignore prospects and pressures in our Congress. We can and should NOW use any and all means at our Constitutional disposal to make double-damned/sure this deeply distressing and ultimately disastrously damaging political situation never occurs again.

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Reader’s Note:For copy-space reasons, “quotes” are condensed, combined, shortened, as demanded for clarity. Full verbatim and all sources available on request to Editor, with ID.

Major special-report magazine section/source was published by The American Prospect and Demos as Mobilizing Millenials: Will their economic future fuel the next New Deal ? in edition dated March 2008, comprising eight articles by specializing authoritative authors, running 23 pages. Demos is found on Internet at demos.org.

Multiple other sources, including more than 60 pages of Internet full-source documentation, and materials from writer’s 50-year working files, was consulted. Entire source-list available on request to Editor, with ID. It is suggested you check out the TAP-issue to inform your
Comments by specific reference to statements made therein, thus facilitating any further dialog here.